Under A Porcelain Sun.
- project Somewhere.
Under a Porcelain Sun, is an attempt to record the stories of ghosts who loiter between public histories and private memory. Set in the Dharampur region in Malwa in the 1800s, it is an adventure game that chronicles the journey of two itinerant thieves in search of a mythical city called Kayamgadh, and becomes a collection of fissured stories about faith, fervor and disillusionment at the margins of colonial rule.
Travel through nineteenth century Malwa, as you encounter salt bandits and brass astronomers; Armies of langoors who all know a secret and decadent Magistrates living in castles of glue; Wax people who melt at noon everyday, only to emerge as different people and Gemstone merchants who live in wells. Mendicants and Jagirdars made of smoke and all manner of strange citizenry that wander the desolate Bhula region. All the while attempting to flee soldiers from the Gwalior cantonment who are searching for you, for having peddled forgeries to their Company commander.
The people of Kayamgadh do not speak.
They are afraid that their words might penetrate the layers under which their bodies are hidden. Afraid that some phrase or name might, through woolen caps and cotton plugs and balled bits of torn rags, enter their buried ears and insert itself into their thoughts, prompting them to think of Kayamgadh not as they see it but as it is being described to them by the person speaking these words.
It is a fear so deeply entrenched, that people now see the city with unwilling eyes, shaded behind their hands, lest they be tempted into a sudden burst of verbiage whilst looking upon the wonders of Kayamgadh. a temptation that might resist the doctrine of their self imposed silence.
For Kayamgadh is a wonderful city, where the craftsmen strive hard to put into form all that they cannot give words to, and where the work of the craftsman is left undisturbed, for it is only looked upon and but never described by the people, who never speak.
C 1804. From the Journal of Charles Henry Connington. As restored and translated by Mir UmamrHassan in 1962, from the original folio compilation by AzizUsta.
Credits :
Created with support from India Foundation for the Arts & Technicolor
Press :
Oleomingus are making some of the prettiest dang video games around. Rock Paper Shotgun.
Oleomingus’s approach to games is hyper-literary. Venture Beat.
Somewhere is a game that Studio Oleomingus has been working on for more than half a decade ... but Somewhere might not exist. PC Gamer June 2018 print edition.
... spaces that challenge the idea of singular spaces and universal narratives. India Today (May 2018).
The game is a story book, a baroque architectural project and a literary puzzle rolled into one. The Week (May 2018).
The concept capitalizes on the language of fracture particular to games. A language that speaks so readily to the occupation of identities, and fragmentation of narrative. Kill Screen
Interactive gaming through literary fiction is a new genre in India and Dhruv Jani is among the pioneers. The Hindu.
.. it adds , incrementally to our understanding of how a traditional literary method responds to being told within an interactive space. The New Indian Express.
.. is consciously trying to minister to neglected spaces, and seems absolutely aware that games, more than any other medium, can do this. Open magazine.
Somewhere weaves [unexplainable] nonsense into an irresistible adventure. Intel IQ.